Nothing lasts forever, including UF email accounts and student discounts.
Graduating seniors’ email accounts expire one year after graduation. At that point, all data attached to the account will be deleted, Saira Hasnain, UFIT spokesperson and senior director, wrote in an email. Any student discounts registered with a UFL email will expire.
To help prevent students from forgetting to transfer important information, UFIT sends them email reminders about moving files to their personal accounts or to a cloud storage before leaving UF, Hasnain wrote. The reminders — which are sent out six months, three months, two months, one month, 15 days and seven days before graduation — specify to students when their UFL emails will expire.
The reminders also include instructions for saving important emails and files, Hasnain wrote.
Despite the policy, some graduates still had access to their emails for several years after graduating. UFIT discovered the inconsistency when it switched email programs last year, Hasnain wrote, which will be addressed by the end of Spring semester.
But some UF students are upset about losing their student discounts and access to resources like JSTOR peer-reviewed articles or property management platforms for paying monthly rent on.
Sarah Huben, a 21-year-old UF communication sciences and disorders senior who will graduate this semester, thinks UF shouldn’t discontinue students’ UFL emails. She noted that still has her email for Broward College, which she attended for dual enrollment in high school in 2017.
“I feel like even though we’re not technically students, it’s a nice professional email to have,” Huben said. “And over the past four years that we’ve all been here, we’ve given a lot of money through tuition, housing and parking, so it would be a nice thing to keep.”
She’s used her UFL email to get a 50% discount on Spotify Premium and the first six months free on Amazon Prime, Huben said.
She also used her UFL email to sign up for online job shadowing. She plans to continue shadowing but said if her UFL email stops working, she may have to change the email on her accounts.
“That’s my main problem,” she said. “All my graduate applications have that email connected to them, so I definitely need the stuff on it.”
Similarly, Sneh Patel, 21-year-old UF political science senior, used his UFL email to buy a student discount package deal with Hulu and Spotify Premium. He said he wishes he could use his email after graduation.
Access to JSTOR peer-reviewed articles has helped Patel with essays. He would like to be able to access peer-reviewed articles in law school for help with legal research.
“I hope I could attend UF law school, so I can continue keeping my email,” Patel said. “That’s the best hope I have.”
Contact J.P. Oprison at joprison@alligator.org. Follow him on Twitter @JOprison.
JP is a fourth-year journalism major with a minor in history. He is currently the health reporter for The Alligator, focusing on how the pandemic is affecting Alachua County and the thousands of students in Gainesville. In his free time, JP likes to exercise at the gym and relax on the beach.
